Tuesday, January 8, 2008

Seattle Loses to Washington

That's right, according to our bffs over at Bulletsforever, the Washington sports teams have defeated their inferior opponents from that dreary western "other Washington" after the awfully adequate Wizards vanquished their unworthy competitor by such a large margin that assistant coaches Phil Hubbard and Dave Hopla were suiting up for garbage-time minutes.

The Wizards continue to stay afloat minus their other superstar, Gilbert Arenas, who seems to be comfortable pwning the internet whilst taking his sweet time to nurture his cursed knee. Speaking of curses, thankfully, both BF and I posted this column after the Seattle beatdown, instead of Tom "Kiss of Death" Boswell, whose last two predictive pieces have been consecutive written versions of Matt Hasslebeck's overtime pep talk vs. the Packers in '03 (also seen in Howard Dean's campaign trail as well). I am starting to believe he has jinxing material mixed in with his gracious 'tism. Should we be concerned that his glorious Nats-World Series predictions during the winter meetings will instead end up with Elijah Dukes being arrested for sending threatening glares to Kelli Johnson while the team moves away to Portland?

Lets not have any sort of 'tism inhibition session here; we need an extra heaping dose of it with the good coach stepping down, and people discussing a certain moustachioed replacement instead of the proper (HINT: assistant coach: Defense) replacement. Well, actually, there has been some good fortune in Washington. First of all, blogger is no longer disabled at the DCO headquarters! And second of all, the Wizards have been the recipients of a gracious path to the postseason while Gilbert takes his time with therapy. As if there were anything for the Wizards to be thankful for regarding injuries, they have been receiving that gold-paved-road treatment with their recent opponent history. Jeez, you would think the way the Wizards encounter teams as soon as they lose key starters, they would resemble, say, the Seahawks. For the umpteenth consecutive time, the Wizards were able to face a team minus it's Wizards-killer, in this case being occasional effort-outputter Chris Wilcox, who was missing from the game with a dislocated finger. In the previous game (another 20+ DIF belittling), the Milwaukee Bucks were without their superstar Michael Redd (did they ever have him?). Tonight, they face a Houston team without their brittle commercial poser, Tracy McGrady, who fought bouts of health for the beginning of this pretty disappointing Rockets early season. The manner in which the Wizards have treated these foes, laughing in their face when they whine about their list of disableds, has been admirable. Other things have been pretty sweet in the recent Wizards-weeks (of which Bobtimist was lost somewhere in the internet, trying to decipher this youtube).

In that Bucks-besmirching, it was nice to see the Wizards actually decimate a team filled with all of their also-rans (Simmons, Ruffin, Storee), unlike in their last loss against Detroit, home of the guaranteed-Bullet-redemption, with their latest convert, Jarvis-freakin'-Hayes in tow. Not unlike a certain flighty-goal-scoring-defenseman who coughs up playoff-clinching goals only to end up on that team years later to both help and torment the Capitals (btw: sweet youtube here), Jarvis returned to Verizon and brought his seldomly-silky-smooth jumper, where **of course** it rains threes in crucial Wiz-coming-from-behind moments. Jarvis was seen talking to the crowd before sitting down, grudgingly answering questions like, "Where the *$%! was that last year, the year before that, and the year before that?" with shrugs. It was nice to see the old Jarvis return earlier in the game, when Andray Blatche fouled him to the floor where he winced, in familiarity.

So, despite Detroit's Wizards-abetted existence, the team remains in great shape, and another reason they remain in such a fantastic position, one I haven't been properly expounding on, as been the play of Caron "Tuff Juice" Butler. Good lawd, the juice is loose, ladies and gentlemen! Besides all of the statistical what-not that Caron has been improving on across the board, he has emitted a sort of rugged, win-first, get-a-triple-double-second, posterize foreigners-third mentality that just floors me. Why is he the heart and soul of this team? Well it could be his "tuff" upbringing, where instead of running screen and rolls under the stern supervision of a slightly abusive daddy, leading to years of moody off court problems, and a possible rape charge, the Juice was running drugs as a hopper in Racine. He played ball for sweets while locked up in solitary. Regailing over his youth-hood almost seems cliched, but I would like to see one of these spoon-fed basketball prodigies deliver a story that even remotely compares.

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